Mounted police

Their day-to-day function is typically picturesque or ceremonial, but they are also employed in crowd control because of their mobile mass and height advantage and increasingly in the UK for crime prevention and high visibility policing roles.

[2] Mounted police may be employed for specialized duties ranging from patrol of parks and wilderness areas, where police cars would be impractical or noisy, to riot duty, where the horse serves to intimidate those whom it is desired to disperse through its larger size, or may be sent in to detain trouble makers or offenders from the crowd.

The French Maréchaussée—direct predecessors of the gendarmerie and the first national police force in a modern sense—were a corps of completely mounted constabulary from their establishment in the early 18th century.

[3] Poor roads and extensive rural areas made horse-mounted police a necessity in European states until the early 20th century.

The establishment of organized law-enforcement bodies throughout Africa, Asia and the Americas during the colonial and post-colonial eras made the concept of predominantly horse-police accepted almost world-wide.

Synthetic saddles are often favored over those made of natural leather to reduce weight, important both because of long riding hours and because police officers must carry numerous articles of personal equipment.

[16][17] The RNWMP's reliance on mounted police units declined significantly after the First World War due to automobiles.

[17][19] Police services in Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver continue to maintain mounted units for community patrols and crowd management at large events.

Toronto's mounted police unit is primarily tasked with community patrols, although they also conduct vehicular stops, assist with searches, and provide crowd management support, particularly in the city’s Entertainment District.

A mounted officer's responsibilities may include liaising with rural and urban communities on horseback or situations that may attract large crowds such as at sporting and cultural events or at demonstrations.

In Arizona, these animals are fed special processed feed pellets so that their wastes do not spread non-native plants in the national parks and wildlife areas they patrol.